Hard Drive Issues
Earlier this week, I experienced a major hard drive "issue." Quite frankly, I'm calling it that because in retrospect, I'm still just not sure what happened. I'm sharing the story because others may benefit from this down the road...
I went to fire up the 'puter the other day, and I directly booted into a blue screen of death with a cryptic message. When Bill pointed me to a forum, the theories ranged from viruses, to spyware to Windows updates. In other words, nobody knows! I tried to boot into DOS, and also the Windows XP disc, but nothing was working, and I was back on the blue screen. After a little thought, I accepted reality, and decided a brand new hard drive was in order (I'm thinking of it as a "hard drive transplant"). What annoyed me was that the "old" drive is a Samsung 250 GB SATA that's barely 6 months old and was working fine before this!
Not wanting to wait for a shipment to arrive, I sprinted over to the local Microcenter. After my recent experience with rebates, I decided to find an offer sans rebate. There was a selection of OEM drives. They come in a plastic bag, no cable, no software, no screws, no manual, and no package. After spending too much time going through a whole display of these, I chose a Western Digital 320 GB drive, SATA interface. I figured at least I could get a minor upgrade out of this; besides they were out of 250's, and the 400's involved a $70 rebate. In retrospect, the $124 I paid was a little expensive as Amazon has it for $108, but when you're down, I want things fixed yesterday. (In retrospect, perhaps the better deal was this one with the 16 meg cache buffer, but alas I digress...). One suggestion to Microcenter, besides lowering the price, is to reorganize the display as the signs on the shelves had nothing to do with what was behind them. It would be very easy to pick up an IDE drive instead of a SATA. I had to read carefully the writing on the drive through the gray plastic, inside a clear plastic antitheft box to determine the contents. I'm sure this is just the trend, but there were very few SATA drives, and a ton of IDE drives. For folks that would build a system, I doubt they'd buy the older IDE standard, and they should adjust the price accordingly to move them out the door.
With my new hard drive purchased, I thought I was home free, but the best was yet to come. You see, I was trying to load up Windows XP, with no service packs. You may recall that Windows XP Service Pack 1 and above support drives above 137 GB. I am kind of the antitheses of the "partitioning maven" as I got my 1st computer a little after Windows 95 came out. In other words, I get seriously lost in DOS. I used to have a guide that a friend gave me on how to format with FDISK, but this is long gone at this point, and I don't remember the cryptic syntax of the ancient computing language.
As the hard drive I purchased had no software, I headed over to the Western Digital site, and downloaded their latest formatting software. Let's just say, no go. For whatever reason, even though I switched to an old fashoned ps/2 mouse and keyboard (DOS doesn't like the USB wireless gear), I couldn't enter the letter commands. The keyboard, and old IBM with the satisfying "clickety clack" feedback that writers love works fine in the Windows environment. After trying several different downloadable boot disks, none would respond to the keyboard, and allow me to format the drive. I'm guessing a weird motherboard issue, but who knows. I know the mouse and keyboard were plugged in correctly because they worked fine in Windows.
While Windows XP SP2, or Vista would have gotten the job done, I wanted to find another way. I'm not ready for Vista as I'm sure the next few months will be a completion of beta testing for Microsoft, and I'm not on their payroll (as an aside, I'm planning a new build for the summer, but do want to keep this machine running as a backup). And I couldn't part with the money for another copy of Windows XP when I already had a paid for working copy. I thought about slipstreaming my copy of Windows XP, but that seemed like a challenge, and a longshot to get the job done anyway from some research. Also, after overpaying for the 320 GB drive, using less than half of it simply wasn't an option either that I wanted to live with.
I'll spare you the painful details (like that Western Digital's Lifeguard Tools can't format anything within Windows involving the boot drive!), but this is what ended up working. Using the Windows XP disc, I formatted the hard drive with the included formatting tools that my keyboard worked with. As I had a few other tries, I did a complete format, and not the quicker one. The C: drive was now formatted for 137 GB, which meant around 130 gigs was available. I then loaded on Windows XP. Then, the Service Pack 1 was downloaded and installed. This adds support for larger hard drives. With this added, now I went into Disc Manager on Windows. I'm not exactly sure how I got there, but some of it gets explained here.
From within Disc Manager, I was able to work on the unallocated space on my boot drive, C:. I told it to rename it D:, and format it. This resulted in a partition of 170 GB of storage as my D: drive, while keeping 130 GB on C:. In total, from my 320 GB drive, this gives me a landscape of 300 gigs which is an awesome amount of space which I will not fill up anytime too soon.
As to the fate of my Samsung 250 GB drive, I'm just not sure. I tried to connect it, with the Western Digital as the boot drive, and the BIOS configured for the WD as the boot drive, and the whole system won't boot. At one point I had the Samsung connected, and both the primary boot portion, and a secondary partition were both corrupted. I'm not sure what would have done this. I'm open to suggestions, but I'm thinking that a full format might save it. Then again, with my recent issues with formatting a brand new drive, that may never happen, at least on this machine. For a new system down the road, I think I'd have less headaches with a new hard drive. The Samsung 250, even with a reformat simply has "bad karma" at this point.
--Jonas
Technorati Tags: western digital, hard drive, computer troubleshooting, hard drive replacement, samsung, setting up a hard drive
I went to fire up the 'puter the other day, and I directly booted into a blue screen of death with a cryptic message. When Bill pointed me to a forum, the theories ranged from viruses, to spyware to Windows updates. In other words, nobody knows! I tried to boot into DOS, and also the Windows XP disc, but nothing was working, and I was back on the blue screen. After a little thought, I accepted reality, and decided a brand new hard drive was in order (I'm thinking of it as a "hard drive transplant"). What annoyed me was that the "old" drive is a Samsung 250 GB SATA that's barely 6 months old and was working fine before this!
Not wanting to wait for a shipment to arrive, I sprinted over to the local Microcenter. After my recent experience with rebates, I decided to find an offer sans rebate. There was a selection of OEM drives. They come in a plastic bag, no cable, no software, no screws, no manual, and no package. After spending too much time going through a whole display of these, I chose a Western Digital 320 GB drive, SATA interface. I figured at least I could get a minor upgrade out of this; besides they were out of 250's, and the 400's involved a $70 rebate. In retrospect, the $124 I paid was a little expensive as Amazon has it for $108, but when you're down, I want things fixed yesterday. (In retrospect, perhaps the better deal was this one with the 16 meg cache buffer, but alas I digress...). One suggestion to Microcenter, besides lowering the price, is to reorganize the display as the signs on the shelves had nothing to do with what was behind them. It would be very easy to pick up an IDE drive instead of a SATA. I had to read carefully the writing on the drive through the gray plastic, inside a clear plastic antitheft box to determine the contents. I'm sure this is just the trend, but there were very few SATA drives, and a ton of IDE drives. For folks that would build a system, I doubt they'd buy the older IDE standard, and they should adjust the price accordingly to move them out the door.With my new hard drive purchased, I thought I was home free, but the best was yet to come. You see, I was trying to load up Windows XP, with no service packs. You may recall that Windows XP Service Pack 1 and above support drives above 137 GB. I am kind of the antitheses of the "partitioning maven" as I got my 1st computer a little after Windows 95 came out. In other words, I get seriously lost in DOS. I used to have a guide that a friend gave me on how to format with FDISK, but this is long gone at this point, and I don't remember the cryptic syntax of the ancient computing language.
As the hard drive I purchased had no software, I headed over to the Western Digital site, and downloaded their latest formatting software. Let's just say, no go. For whatever reason, even though I switched to an old fashoned ps/2 mouse and keyboard (DOS doesn't like the USB wireless gear), I couldn't enter the letter commands. The keyboard, and old IBM with the satisfying "clickety clack" feedback that writers love works fine in the Windows environment. After trying several different downloadable boot disks, none would respond to the keyboard, and allow me to format the drive. I'm guessing a weird motherboard issue, but who knows. I know the mouse and keyboard were plugged in correctly because they worked fine in Windows.
While Windows XP SP2, or Vista would have gotten the job done, I wanted to find another way. I'm not ready for Vista as I'm sure the next few months will be a completion of beta testing for Microsoft, and I'm not on their payroll (as an aside, I'm planning a new build for the summer, but do want to keep this machine running as a backup). And I couldn't part with the money for another copy of Windows XP when I already had a paid for working copy. I thought about slipstreaming my copy of Windows XP, but that seemed like a challenge, and a longshot to get the job done anyway from some research. Also, after overpaying for the 320 GB drive, using less than half of it simply wasn't an option either that I wanted to live with.
I'll spare you the painful details (like that Western Digital's Lifeguard Tools can't format anything within Windows involving the boot drive!), but this is what ended up working. Using the Windows XP disc, I formatted the hard drive with the included formatting tools that my keyboard worked with. As I had a few other tries, I did a complete format, and not the quicker one. The C: drive was now formatted for 137 GB, which meant around 130 gigs was available. I then loaded on Windows XP. Then, the Service Pack 1 was downloaded and installed. This adds support for larger hard drives. With this added, now I went into Disc Manager on Windows. I'm not exactly sure how I got there, but some of it gets explained here.
From within Disc Manager, I was able to work on the unallocated space on my boot drive, C:. I told it to rename it D:, and format it. This resulted in a partition of 170 GB of storage as my D: drive, while keeping 130 GB on C:. In total, from my 320 GB drive, this gives me a landscape of 300 gigs which is an awesome amount of space which I will not fill up anytime too soon.
As to the fate of my Samsung 250 GB drive, I'm just not sure. I tried to connect it, with the Western Digital as the boot drive, and the BIOS configured for the WD as the boot drive, and the whole system won't boot. At one point I had the Samsung connected, and both the primary boot portion, and a secondary partition were both corrupted. I'm not sure what would have done this. I'm open to suggestions, but I'm thinking that a full format might save it. Then again, with my recent issues with formatting a brand new drive, that may never happen, at least on this machine. For a new system down the road, I think I'd have less headaches with a new hard drive. The Samsung 250, even with a reformat simply has "bad karma" at this point.--Jonas
Technorati Tags: western digital, hard drive, computer troubleshooting, hard drive replacement, samsung, setting up a hard drive
posted by digitaldoc at 11:26 AM
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